When I make bread buns and loaves, the crust always comes out hard and cracky. I like simple basic recipes, using just flour, water and yeast. But I've always read that adding fats to the dough makes the bread softer. I don't like fat though. But I wonder, if I can get away with just one of those fats in my dough, which ingredient gives the most soft crust? and should I add that ingrient to the dough itself, or only use as coating just before baking?

Would anyone know what an oil such as ext. vir. OLIVE OIL would do to a ciabatta dough? I make a straight up ciabatta with just flour yeast salt & water and I'm just wondering what the addition of some OO would do to that dough... more holey crumb or the opposite?

I made Reinhart's focaccia recipe from the BBA a couple weeks ago and it turned out very well. Interestingly, I noticed that the olive oil and water are simultaneously mixed with the flour. I understand that fats are typically added later in the mixing process so that the gluten is given more time to form and so the fat doesn't lubricate the gluten and prevent it from forming longer strands.

I have been making what I think is some very flavorful bread recently. A few years ago I discovered a local mill and have been playing with their organic wheat and rye flours. The other week my mother-in-law, a great baker herself was enjoying the bread and she asked what oil I used. When she learned that this bread was only flour, water and salt she was puzzled. Why would I make a bread without any fat? She learned to bake in the 40's and used pork fat.

Maybe I'm doing something totally faux pas, but I never oil the bowl for rising. I mix and knead in the dlx mixing bowl, I remove the hook or the scraper and roller, and then I shape it a bit so I can when it has doubled, and then I put the DLX bowl lid over top. When it's doubled, I just grab the mass, and only a tiny bit sticks, I scrape that up, add it to the rest and then fold it a few times for shaping or the second rise, whichever it needs.

When it cools, it's extremely light and fluffy, with HUGE holes in it. The closest you'll ever get to eating clouds. But for some reason, it goes tough and hard within 24h despite being kept in an airtight plastic box.